


Ready Player One: So Much Time, And So Little To See

by AndyRobot



Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - All Media Types, Ready Player One - Ernest Cline, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 22:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5472374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndyRobot/pseuds/AndyRobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometime after the events of the original book, the four surviving Gunters are brought back together to play a mysterious Flicksync (movie-dialogue based simulation game) of the original Willy Wonka film. Who's behind it? Why are they there? What's a snozzberry? Two of these three questions will be answered...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ready Player One: So Much Time, And So Little To See

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hilandmum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilandmum/gifts).



I smelled smoke. And crisp, cold air. And chocolate. Definitely chocolate. 

“What the hell?” That was Aech – no doubt about it, though at the moment he looked like a blurry blob. When my vision cleared, and I saw what he was wearing, I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Dude! Nice cowboy gear.” 

“Whatever, man.” He was laughing too. “What’s with the urchin look? Aren’t you supposed to be, like, super rich now?”

Urchin look? I looked down at myself. Aech was right – I definitely appeared to be dressed in scruffy, hand-me-down clothing. But that wasn’t the weirdest thing.

“Hey Aech –“

“Yeah?”

“Are we… shorter than usual?” 

“I would not describe any of this as ‘usual’.” A third voice – one with a thick Japanese accent.

“Shoto!” Aech and I exclaimed. Shoto looked even more ridiculous than we did, if that was possible – he sported a truly dorky suit, with short pants. We were all set to make fun of him for his ridiculous get-up, but something about him seemed off. We hadn’t asked to be here – but Shoto really didn’t want to be here. 

“All right, guys. Settle down,” I said. “Clearly, we’re in some kind of Flicksync of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But why?”

“Yeah, and where’s your girlfriend?” asked Aech, with just a hint of shade.

“Good question,” said Art3mis, appearing right on cue, dressed in a red coat with a white collar. “All I know is that I came here to kick ass or chew bubblegum. And I hate bubblegum, so I chose Veruca.” 

“Wait – they gave you a choice? That’s not fair!” said Aech.

“It’s not my fault I’m the only girl.”

“Um, actually, you’re not. Hello?” Aech presented as male in the OASIS, but in reality she was an African-American woman named Harriet. 

But before Art3mis could respond, a warning buzzed onto our HUDs – FLICKSYNC BEGINS IN 3… 2… 1… 

And before we knew it, we were off and running.

Unlike most Flicksyncs, this one seemed to be starting in the middle of the movie – when the Golden Ticket winners actually arrived at Willy Wonka’s factory. And – surprise, surprise – when good old Willy finally emerged from his factory doing his fake-hobbling schtick, ending in a fantastic somersault – wouldn’t you know it, tonight, for one night only, the role of Willy Wonka was played by none other than James Halliday. 

I’d seen this movie a bunch of times already – it was one of Halliday’s favorites as a kid. Not only that, but it had become a sort of Gunter cliché to refer to the “hunt for Halliday’s Easter Egg” as a “modern day Willy Wonka story.” Heck, even I’d thought that some reference to the movie might have shown up somewhere in the original quest. 

But no – too obvious. I mean, of course it was too obvious. So, what were we doing here? The quest was over, we found the three hidden keys and the three hidden gates, and – when the dust settled – there could be only one. And that was me. The Highlander of the OASIS. 

Except I hadn’t done it all by my lonesome. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without a little help from my friends. Aech clued me in that ZORK would be a big part of the journey. Art3mis was the only one of us to figure out that Tempest was an Atari game and a Shakespeare play. Shoto had been invaluable in the final battle. And Daito – 

Poor Daito. 

Halliday spoke. “Hold your breath. Make a wish. Count to three.” 

We were looking out over the lush, green candy forest of the Chocolate Room. It smelled like powdered sugar and magic.  
“I hope you know this… Um,” I heard myself say. “I wouldn’t be here without any of you. Daito, too.” 

The words DIALOGUE WARNING! popped onto my display, as I knew they would. When you were in a Flicksync, you couldn’t break character, you couldn’t drop out to check the script, and you could only drop a line a limited number of times. Three strikes, and you were out.

I saw Shoto lower his eyes. I put my hand on his shoulder. 

We walked down the stairs. Suddenly, Halliday’s cane thwapped back, stopping us in our tracks. 

Art3mis yelped. “Jesus! You nearly knee-capped me! What the hell kind of children’s movie is this!” 

"DIALOGUE WARNING!"

“Come with me.. and you’ll be… in a world of pure imagination,” sang Halliday.

 

Aech got a Dialogue Warning, too, when Wonka/Halliday plucked a hair from his head, causing him to unleash a stream of profanities that would make a longshoreman blush. Apart from that, though, we played our parts the best we could.

Except Shoto. He just stood by the chocolate river and stared. At this point, Augustus Gloop is supposed to be shoveling liquid chocolate into his mouth. 

But Shoto just stood there - gazing at the waterfall. 

Mrs. Gloop said “Augustus – sweetheart – save some room for later.”

“Onaka ga suite inai. Watashi wa mo ni fuku shite imasu..” Shoto’s voice was barely a whisper. 

The simulation glitched backwards. Mrs. Gloop said it again. 

“Watashi no ani wa shinde imasu. Go ryōshō kudasai!” *This time, he was yelling. 

Mrs. Gloop opened her mouth to deliver her line a third and final time. 

And Shoto… there’s no other way to say it. Shoto looked exactly like Tetsuo Shima in the climax of the 1988 anime classic Akira. His eyes burned with rage. Veins pulsed from his arms and forehead.

And that’s when the river erupted. 

A tempest of brown, sweet liquid exploded upwards. Oompa Loompas ran and hid in terror. The pipes exploded. The non-player characters – Grampa Joe, Violet Beauregard, and the rest of them – froze in static-laced silence, like someone had hit pause on an ancient VCR. 

Halliday exclaimed “Oh, uh, Augustus – please don’t do that. My chocolate must never be touched by human hands-“

Out of the chocolate river emerged a phalanx of ghoulish creatures. They wore white, tattered shrouds. Their gnarled, deathly faces opened in howls of terror as they crept slowly towards us. It took me a second, but I recognized them eventually – they were the first bad guys you had to face, in the 1987 NES game Castlevania. 

“Zombies,” said Art3mis.

“Well,” said Aech. “Looks like shit just got real.” 

I didn’t know what would happen if any of the zombies touched Shoto, or us, or any of the frozen bad-tracking VCR-on-pause versions of our lovable heroes from Willy Wonka. And – frankly – I didn’t want to know. 

I grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a weapon. It happened to be a giant lollipop. The way things were going, I figured it’d be as effective as anything else. 

I charged into battle. 

The thing that any Gunter will tell you – and this has been true for decades, centuries, possibly millennia – is that time flies when you’re grinding. Not only that, but, when you’re concentrating on wiping out that zombie horde, or that plague of liches, or that nest of robo-scorpions, it’s easy to miss important details. Things like: your dinner has gone cold. Or: your wife/husband has left you and taken the kids. Or: a mysterious object has appeared in your inventory and you’re not quite sure where you got it from. 

Using my makeshift lollipop sword, I was able to cut huge swaths through the legions of undead rising up out of the candy-sweet abyss. Art3mis grabbed fresh grown candy canes out of the ground and fashioned them into stakes, expertly dispatching ghouls with elan and grace, while Aech turned the marshmallow cream mushrooms into a kind of war-hammer, knocking zombies into the river three at a time.

I body-checked a particularly nasty undead creature into the chocolate river, and then turned to see a skeletal wraith advancing on the frozen form of James Halliday himself. His bony hand seemed to beckon Halliday’s very soul out of his virtual body. 

“It is time…” it croaked. “You have waited too long.” 

Then, from directly behind me, I heard Shoto calling “Get down!”

I followed his instructions as a lightning storm poured forth from Shoto’s hands and into the shrouded wraith.  
The wraith struggled, and sputtered, and – breathing a cloud of black smoke that turned the artificial blue sky into darkest night – collapsed into a pile of steaming rags on the spearmint grass. 

At this, the remaining zombies ceased their onslaught, and retreated back into the cocoa river – already littered with the remains of the undead. 

Halliday/Wonka – and the other non-player characters – sputtered to life. 

“-touched by human hands. Please don’t – don’t do that! You’re contaminating my entire river! Please – I beg you, Augustus!”

We turned and looked at Shoto. He stood, stone cold, like a statue, on the river bed. 

A breath. 

And he fell, backwards, into the chocolate river, and lay motionless. 

“Shoto!” cried Art3mis, rushing to his side. But Shoto’s avatar had disappeared, leaving his inventory behind. 

"DIALOGUE WARNING! FINAL WARNING."

“Oh, put a sock in it,” she mumbled. And, muttering under her breath, she – too – was eliminated from the Flicksync. 

Aech and I tried to quit out, but found we were unable to leave. The best bet would be to resign ourselves to finishing the movie as best we could.

Another NPC replaced Art3mis as Veruca Salt, which is really too bad because she would have rocked that “I Want The World” song. 

Aech – like Mike Teevee in the film – was sent by Wonkavision and shrunk down to the size of a mouse, where – well, that’s a story for another time.

I still didn’t understand why we were playing this particular Flicksync, nor why we had been brought here against our will. But I played on – through that last heartbreaking scene where Charlie is told he broke the rules, and so – therefore – he gets nothing – all the more heartbreaking for me because it was my hero, James Halliday, in Gene Wilder’s costume, yelling at me – Wade Watts, aka Parzival, aka the guy that had beaten the odds to win the contest to run the OASIS in the first place. 

“You get NOTHING! Good DAY, sir!” 

Grandpa Joe and I turned to leave. But then, like in the movie, he nudged Charlie. He nudged me. 

“Go on, Charlie.”

That’s when I remembered the inventory notification – the one I received completely out of the blue, in the middle of the fight with the Castlevania zombies. There’s no way, I thought, as I opened my inventory, half expecting to see the  
Everlasting Gobstopper.

Instead, I saw a shiny silver coin. I looked closer at it. 

It was a quarter. The year on the quarter was 1981. 

And – suddenly – all became clear to me. That day, at Halliday’s favorite video arcade, so lovingly recreated in the OASIS, where I’d gotten the highest score possible in Pac-Man and had received – as my reward – the one thing every gamer wants: a second chance. One more quarter. One more life.

James Halliday’s spirit was infused into every pixel of his creation, and – now – it was up to me to bring him back home, back to the world he built. To live on, inside the OASIS. 

Forever. 

And in order to do that, he needed us. Me, Shoto, Aech, and Art3mis, breaking from the script. He needed us to literally change the rules from within the game. 

“Mr. Halliday?”

Silence.

I retrieved the quarter from my inventory and placed it solemnly onto his desk. 

I stood there for a moment, wondering if I should say something. Then, I turned and walked towards the door.

“Wade-“

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“My dear boy,” said Halliday. “You’ve won!” 

“Pff.” I said. “Been there, done that. You’re the guy who just scored yourself a second chance.” 

THE END

* - Shoto is saying - more or less - "I'm not hungry, I am in mourning, I miss my brother, please leave me alone." At least that's what I fed into Google Translate.


End file.
